The present invention relates to a rewritable storage medium, a recording apparatus and a playback apparatus for use with the storage medium, a method for recording data on the storage medium, and to a computer program executing the recording method. More particularly, the present invention is adaptive to, and preferably used with, an optical disc on which a large amount of still picture data is recorded.
Large-capacity, rewritable optical disc recording media, such as DVD-RAMs or DVD-RWs, have been made available, and many technologies for recording picture data or audio data on the media are now being developed. Video data coded, for example, in the MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group) system described in the ISO/IEC11172 or ISO/IEC13818 standard is usually used. Still picture data coded in the intraframe compression method (I picture) of the MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group) system or in the JPEG system described in the ISO/IEC10918-1 standard is usually used.
Digital VCRs (digital video cassette recorders) using magnetic tapes as recording media or electric still cameras using memories such as a flash memory as recording media are already in practical use for storing coded video or still pictures with audio.
Recording apparatuses using optical discs as recording media, such as DVD-RAMs, have many advantages over conventional digital VCRs or electric still cameras in that they feature random accessibility which cannot be attained by magnetic tapes, large-capacity which cannot be achieved by memories such as a flash memory, and a low cost per bit. Therefore, recording apparatuses using optical disc media allow the user to play back data independently of the sequence in which data was recorded and to process as many as tens of thousands of still pictures. For this reason, optical disc recording media are expected to be widely used as new AV (audio-visual) recording media.